Note 94 — ALAEDDIN; OR, THE WONDERFUL LAMP.

The first notice of the signet-ring and its adventures is by Herodotus in the Legend of the Samian Polycrates; and here it may be observed that the accident is probably founded on fact; every fisherman knows that fish will seize and swallow spoon-bait and other objects that glitter. The text is the Talmudic version of Solomon’s seal-ring. The king of the demons, after becoming a “Bottle-imp,” prayed to be set free upon condition of teaching a priceless secret, and after cajoling the Wise One flung his signet into the sea and cast the owner into a land four hundred miles distant. Here David’s son begged his bread till he was made head cook to the King of Ammon at Mash Kernín. After a while, he eloped with Na’úzah, the daughter of his master, and presently when broiling a fish found therein his missing property. In the Moslem version, Solomon had taken prisoner Amínah, the daughter of a pagan prince, and had homed her in his Harem, where she taught him idolatry. One day before going to the Hammam he entrusted to her his signet-ring presented to him by the four angelic Guardians of sky, air, water and earth when the mighty Jinni Al-Sakhr (see vol. i. 41; v. 36), who was hovering about unseen, snatching away the ring, assumed the king’s shape, whereby Solomon’s form became so changed that his courtiers drove him from his own doors. Thereupon Al-Sakhr, taking seat upon the throne, began to work all manner of iniquity, till one of the Wazirs, suspecting the transformation, read aloud from a scroll of the law: this caused the demon to fly shrieking and to drop the signet into the sea. Presently Solomon, who had taken service with a fisherman, and received for wages two fishes a day, found his ring and made Al-Sakhr a “Bottle-imp.” The legend of St. Kentigern or Mungo of Glasgow, who recovered the Queen’s ring from the stomach of a salmon, is a palpable imitation of the Biblical incident which paid tribute to Cæsar.